Who ruled Toronto?

Toronto lies on the north-western shore of Lake Ontario, where a sheltered harbour is enclosed by a chain of sandy islands and the Humber and Don rivers reach the lake. From here an overland trail, the Toronto Carrying-Place, ran north to Lake Simcoe and the upper Great Lakes, a shortcut long used by Indigenous traders and later by French fur merchants. The modern city began in 1793 as York, a small British colonial capital, and only in the second half of the twentieth century did it overtake Montreal to become Canada's largest city and one of the most diverse urban populations in the world.

People have lived in the area for more than 12,000 years. From about the 1200s Iroquoian-speaking farmers grew maize, beans and squash in villages along the rivers, and by the 1500s they had moved north to join the Huron-Wendat confederacy around Georgian Bay. In the later seventeenth century, after wars that dispersed the Wendat, Seneca of the Haudenosaunee confederacy founded villages at the lake end of the carrying trail, among them Teiaiagon on the Humber. They withdrew by the early 1700s, and Anishinaabe Mississauga people settled the shore. The name Toronto probably comes from a Mohawk phrase, usually translated as trees standing in water, which first referred to fishing weirs near Lake Simcoe.

French traders built small posts on the Humber in 1720 and 1750, and in 1751 the fortified post of Fort Rouillé, near today's Exhibition grounds. Its garrison burned it in 1759 as British forces advanced during the Seven Years' War, and with the fall of New France the region passed to the British Empire.

After the American Revolution, Loyalist refugees settled along Lake Ontario, and in 1787 British officials negotiated the Toronto Purchase from the Mississaugas, a deal whose vague terms were disputed for two centuries and finally settled by a payment from the Canadian government in 2010. In 1793 Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe founded the town of York, which became the capital of Upper Canada. American forces captured and looted it in April 1813, during the War of 1812, burning the parliament buildings.

In 1834 the town was incorporated as the City of Toronto, with the radical William Lyon Mackenzie as its first mayor; in 1837 he led a brief, failed rebellion from a tavern north of the city. Irish immigrants fleeing the famine arrived in large numbers in 1847, and railways from the 1850s made Toronto an industrial and banking centre. It became capital of the new province of Ontario at Confederation in 1867. A great fire in 1904 destroyed much of the downtown business district.

After the Second World War immigration from Italy, Portugal, Greece, the Caribbean and later from South and East Asia transformed the city. A metropolitan federation with its suburbs was created in 1954, a subway opened the same year, and by the 1970s Toronto had overtaken Montreal both in population and as the country's financial centre. The suburbs were merged into a single City of Toronto in 1998. Today the city has about three million people, and the wider region roughly seven million, making it the largest urban area in Canada, where around half the residents were born outside the country.